Freedom, Loyalty, Dissent

Freedom, Loyalty, Dissent

Freedom, Loyalty, Dissent

Excerpt

The essays now collected in this volume were written at different times and for different occasions over a period of six years, but all are bound together by a common theme and a unified point of view. The theme, alas more relevant today than it was even in 1947, when the first of these essays was written, is the necessity of freedom in a society such as the American; the point of view is practical and pragmatic. The argument that runs through all of these papers is that we must preserve and encourage the exercise of freedom of inquiry, investigation, dissent, association, education, science, literature, politics -- freedom, in short, in all of its manifestations, not as an abstract right but as an imperative necessity. Freedom is not a luxury that we can indulge in when at last we have security and prosperity and . . .